Adyashanti | Enlightenment is a destructive process
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"Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
Adyashant
Kevin Sorbo | what the governments of disarmed citizens have done
"If you think mass shooters have killed too many people, just wait till you find out what the governments of disarmed citizens have done."
Kevin Sorbo
Vince Ebert | Political correctness
"Political correctness has now reached a level in our society that I see as highly questionable. It starts with the deletion of more and more postings in the social media. Postings, mind you, with content that is clearly not punishable or otherwise legally actionable. The mere fact that a certain group might feel offended by a text is enough. More and more companies and corporations are joining this unfortunate trend and issuing internal memos about required language rules or how to deal with certain topics, the disregard of which can lead to serious consequences for employees. Again, these are not criminal or justiciable matters (which, of course, should rightly be stopped), but rather some of the most harmless formulations and matters that are actually covered by the right to freedom of expression. What I find most alarming, however, is the development at our universities. Places where the free exchange of ideas and opinions should actually be part of the basic equipment. Almost every day, professors, doctoral students and other university staff tell me that they would now be risking their careers if they were to publicly question or criticize current developments at universities. Theses and assertions have even become established there in the meantime, some of which contradict a fundamental scientific factual basis. Unfortunately, I do not see the end of the line. I think it will get much worse."
Vince Ebert
Karl Kraus | How is the world ruled and led to war?
"How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print."
Karl Kraus
Rose Wilder Lane | No state, no government exists
"The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men."
Rose Wilder Lane
Gilbert Keith Chesterton | You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it
"You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it. You cannot fight without something to fight for. To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust. It may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Bhagavad-Gita | With the destruction of the family
"With the destruction of the family, the spiritual traditions of the family perish forever; when spiritual values are destroyed, then unrighteousness predominates the entire society."
Bhagavad-Gita
Noam Chomsky | Therefore it’s important to distract them
"The bewildered herd is a problem. We’ve got to prevent their roar and trampling. We’ve got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like "Support our troops." You’ve got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they’re properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they’re not competent to think. Therefore it’s important to distract them and marginalize them."
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky | why the propaganda system works
"I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them."
Noam Chomsky
Anne Lammott | The most profound thing
"The most profound thing we have to offer our children is our own healing."
Anne Lammott
Georges Bernanos | violence in the service of the totalitarian state
"It is not the use of violence that seems to me condemnable, but its mysticism, the religion of violence in the service of the totalitarian state, in the service of the dictatorship of the general welfare, considered not as a means but as an end."
Georges Bernanos
Milton Friedman | shortage of sand
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand."
Milton Friedman
George Orwell | horrible features of war
"One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
George Orwell
Hunter S. Thompson | Die Presse ist eine Bande von grausamen Schwuchteln
"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."
Hunter S. Thompson
Winston Churchill | bodyguard of lies
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
Winston S. Churchill
George Orwell | The most effective way to destroy people
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
George Orwell
Yuval Noah Harari | to gain control over the world
I mean science, as an institution, is interested in gaining the power — to gain control over the world
Yuval Noah Harari
Julius Evola | to keep standing amid a world of ruins
"Let us leave modern men to their 'truths' and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins."
Julius Evola
Gore Vidal | As societies grow decadent
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
Gore Vidal
Henry Louis Mencken | The whole drift of our law
"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society."
Henry Louis Mencken
George Orwell | A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
George Orwell
Niccolò Machiavelli | majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances
"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."
Niccolò Machiavelli
Gore Vidal | The modern dictatorship doesn’t come with brown or black uniforms
"What is a president, then? He is the mouthpiece of the corporations - and nothing else. [....] We are no longer a democracy. We gave up our constitution long ago. [....] The modern dictatorship doesn't come with brown or black uniforms. We do it with entertainment, with television, with fun, fun. And an education that dumbs down."
Gore Vidal
Leonard E. Feeney | Having a television in your home
"Having a television in your home is like having a Jew in your living room."
Fr. Leonard E. Feeney
Albert Schweitzer | Modern man is held in a frenzy of activity
"Modern man is held in a frenzy of activity, so as not to reflect on the meaning of his life and the world"
Albert Schweitzer
Clarence Darrow | You can only be free if I am free
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
"
Clarence Darrow
H. P. Lovecraft | It is not a true civilization
"It is not a true civilization, and has nothing in it to satisfy a mature and fully developed human mind. It is attuned to the mentality of the galley-slave and the moron, and crushes relentlessly with disapproval, ridicule, and economic annihilation any sign of actually independent thought and civilised feeling whith chances to rise above its sodden level. It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture – drugged and frenzied with the hashish of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy. Its denizens do not live or know how to live."
H. P. Lovecraft
General Aladeen | Why are you guys so anti-dictators?
"Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests."
General Aladeen
George Orwell | These people don’t see that
"These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you."
George Orwell
Barry Jünemann | Faith is the graveyard of many truths
"And still, no one knows! And the truth remains hidden. Faith is the graveyard of many truths. And the mortician is the system of the self-appointed rulers of this earth. However, people often decorate it with the flowers of ignorance! Faith is the most dangerous instrument of the system since ancient Babylon.... and nobody notices it!"
Barry Jünemann
Bertrand Russell | Fear is the main source of superstition
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
Bertrand Russell
Noam Chomsky | bludgeon is to a totalitarian state
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
Noam Chomsky
Mahatma Gandhi | the truth is still the truth
"Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth."
Mahatma Gandhi
